Youth voice in afterschool STEM: Peeking behind the curtain

STEM learning in afterschool has really taken off over the past decade and there is little doubt of the importance of these spaces for engaging young people with STEM. The most recent America After 3PM study tells us that 73% of afterschool programs offer STEM and that 72% of parents look for these opportunities when choosing a program for their children.

At the same time, the attention paid to authentic and meaningful youth voice has grown significantly. So, we started to wonder – what does youth voice look like in STEM programs? And given how energized young people are about making change in the world, what does civic engagement using STEM look like in afterschool STEM programs?

Our study “STEM and Community Engagement in the Afterschool Environment,” conducted as part of our Collective for Youth Empowerment in STEM & Society (CYESS) initiative, aimed to begin understanding this issue. We conducted a broad national survey of programs alongside some interviews of both adults and young people to dig into our questions. We focused on afterschool and out-of-school-time programs working with teens, as that is a critical age when young people have gained knowledge and skills they are looking to apply in real world contexts but also need support to exercise their agency.

Is STEM only a workforce issue?

In addition to exploring what programming at the intersection of afterschool STEM, teen leadership, and civic engagement looks like, we wanted to understand if there was any tension between STEM learning for workforce readiness and approaching STEM as a tool for community-oriented civic goals. And the answer is a clear “No”: findings actually indicate a trend towards using community engagement as the bridge that establishes STEM’s relevance and meaning for youth.

Many programs were clear that their purpose for offering STEM engagement was not to view STEM exclusively as a career pathway but also as a vehicle for nurturing young people into becoming citizens who contribute to their communities. This finding bolsters our belief at CYESS that not only do youth deserve a say in issues that affect them, but when we empower them with STEM knowledge and invite them to the table, they will create innovative new solutions and be invested in improving the world around them – often beyond what adults can imagine.

Challenges when authentically engaging youth in STEM learning

Program leaders were also honest about the challenges in integrating youth perspectives into their programs. They noted the difficulty of balancing an authentic youth-driven approach and the level of adult support needed to help youth formulate attainable solutions to their societal concerns. Project continuity poses another unique challenge when young people select the societal concern they would like to address with their project. While youth-centered, this approach is at risk of creating disjointed efforts over the years as youth leave the program and new participants select different concerns they’d like to address.

Finally, this study shed light on a fundamental tension between fully participatory programming and traditional funding models, wherein conventional funding often necessitates a detailed proposal outlining the approach to a predefined problem and its anticipated solutions, while genuinely participatory programming starts without preconceived outcomes.

The report discusses some recommendations to tackle these challenges for both afterschool leaders and funders.  

Read the full report or the executive summary to learn more.

What’s coming next?

Our report is just the beginning of our exploration of this work. We want to systematically analyze the approaches and practices for this work to highlight promising practices. And I am especially interested in how we assess the impacts of such programs not only on the young people themselves but also on the communities they come from. Do we find better solutions when we have more of an intergenerational approach to both problem definition and problem solution? The answer to this will be key in our effort to normalize youth involvement in societal decision making.    

We plan to undertake a robust research project to dig into some of these questions. But in the meantime, we would love to keep getting information from programs on how you are approaching this work. We’d love to have you take the survey to enter your information! The data will be then anonymously included in the data dashboard for this project.

If you are interested to learn more about our CYESS initiative, check out our website as well as some of our current projects. And follow us on LinkedIn to connect with us!